A Red Peace, first in Spencer Ellsworth's Starfire trilogy, is an action-packed space opera in a universe where the oppressed half-Jorian crosses have risen up to supplant humanity and dominate the galaxy.

Half-breed human star navigator Jaqi, working the edges of human-settled space on contract to whoever will hire her, stumbles into possession of an artifact that the leader of the Resistance wants desperately enough to send his personal guard after. An interstellar empire and the fate of the remnant of humanity hang in the balance.

Spencer Ellsworth has written a classic space opera, with space battles between giant bugs, sun-sized spiders, planets of cyborgs and a heroine with enough grit to bring down the galaxy's newest warlord.

Unsettling at first but once you get used to all the jargons used in this book, you’ll find yourself having a hard time in putting it down. The basic premise is that the age of humans is coming to an end when the crosses (term for human/alien hybrids) that they’ve made—through vat culture—rallied together and started a resistance . Our female protagonist, Jaqi, who is a cross herself wanted nothing to do with the war and had spent her life in hiding and doing shady stuff. But just like the girl of destiny, she suddenly found herself in the thick of it all. Then, we have our male protagonist who is also a cross and a high ranking soldier of the resistance. Plus, he’s suffering from a terrible PTSD to the point that he got addicted to drugs.

It’s pretty interesting to follow the story particularly that we have these seemingly underdog hybrid crosses (who were once treated as machines and servants by the superior human race) made a reversal of their pitiful lives and are now doing everything to wipe out their overlords, the humans. I think it would have been more interesting if the book gave me a chance to know our characters (main or supporting) more because the way Ellsworth wrote them made me feel like I was just scratching the surface.

Also, I didn’t buy the idea of Jaqi throwing out all of her rules out the window for a couple of kids she just met. It just didn’t compute with her happy-go-lucky and always on the run personality. Personally, it’d made more sense if she had just left the kids to die and maybe…the author should’ve used another and more realistic way to trigger the events of the book.

Another thing that I wished for this book is for a more comprehensive world-building given the ambitiousness of the whole story. There’s a galactic war to raze the human race to extinction, a Dark Zone threating to swallow the whole universe, and hate-filled alien/human hybrids who, instead of using high-powered ammo, wield swords that suck the memories of its victims. There a lot of things worth showing in this book and I hope that Ellsworth will do such in the sequels.

All in all, I’m really glad to have given A Red Peace a try. It may not be as intense as Luke Skywalker discovering that he’s a Jedi but it’ll surely feed your sci-fi hunger. I’m looking forward to read the next book in the series.

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THE WAYWAYD KITSUNE

Being a fox disguising as a human being, the Wayward Kitsune's time is always spent on hiding and coming up with various disguises. Luckily, kitsunes are blessed with long life and thus, WK was able to squeeze in reading, blogging, video gaming, watching TV shows, and pets in her hectic schedule.

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